Healthy Habits For The New Year
Before you take the advice from a gossip magazine on what “worked” for a famous celebrity, it’s important to ensure you are enhancing your wellness in harmony with your surroundings.
Rather than working against your body’s natural responses during the cold winter months, focus on optimizing your wellness by providing whole body nourishment with the following healthy habits…
There are only two optimal times to deeply cleanse during the year, and the start of a new year is not one of those times. In ayurvedic medicine, you are encouraged to optimally support your body based on the season and the external environment.
If you think about our external surroundings in winter, it’s cold, crisp, dry and dark. Well, our internal mind, body and soul tend to reflect our surroundings.
We add layers to retain warmth and protect our skin from the dry crisp air, our digestive system can become stagnant and slow leading to constipation, our mind can become spacey and our thought patterns can become dark.
Naturally, our bodies try to hold on to everything in the winter months including weight to preserve energy and warmth, which will nourish and replenish our mind, body and soul.
When we enhance a cleansing action with laxatives and herbal remedies during the winter months, we are creating a cold damp environment internally in which our vitality and energy can decrease leading to low immune system and lack of nutrient support.
Rather than working against your body’s natural responses during the cold winter months, focus on optimizing your wellness by providing whole body nourishment with the following healthy habits:
- Start a daily journal. Writing down your thoughts, dreams, ideas, experiences, trauma and every emotion or situation you encounter is a way of cleansing in and of itself. Not only are you cleansing and releasing, you are creating space for growth and new healthy thought patterns to evolve.
- Warm up your digestive system. To reduce gas, bloating, constipation, abdominal pain and feeling heavy, I recommend you enhance your digestive fire, known as agni, with warming herbs such as ginger. Steep a 1-inch nugget of fresh ginger in a liter of water and drink it daily. Not only does this ignite your digestive system to create warmth throughout the body, but the digestive system is also the key holder for your motivation, drive and passion.
- Mindful movement…this does not necessarily mean that you need to go out and enroll at a gym that you might only use for the first few weeks of 2019. Rather, this can be done for free in the comfort of your own home. Essentially, this involves the movement of the body in which you remain mindful. This may sound simple and easy, but how often do you remain mindful when you are lowering down during a push up or striking through to cobra. Naturally, you are visualizing the end of the movement, rather than noticing each muscle, thought pattern and movement of breath that occurs throughout the movement.
- Replenish and rest the digestive system. If you are feeling full, heavy and bloated, rather than trying to cleanse the system with laxatives, you should work on giving the digestive system rest with food that is easy to digest. This could include only eating vegetables that are steamed or fully cooked, or eating more soups and stews that have simmered down to allow for easy digestion.
I invite you to change your perspective on a fresh start this year by living in harmony with your surroundings this winter; making mindful, realistic and sustainable lifestyle changes that will keep your motivated and inspired along your wellness journey.
We would love to see how you are making healthy changes in the near year. Please tag us on social media to connect @joannesplace
Happy New Year!
MARISSA LAUGHLIN
REGISTERED HOLISTIC NUTRITIONIST
Inspiring a balanced lifestyle through holistic nutrition, yoga + meditation
